PAYING THE FARMERS -ACTION OR CRONYISM ?

In my post after Blair’s botched reshuffle I mentioned my mixed feelings that Margaret Beckett, who richly deserved the sack for her inexcusable failure to pay Britain’s farmers the Single Farm Payment cash they were due months ago, had instead been promoted. At least as Foreign secretary she can’t do so much damage to Cumbria’s farms and rural areas.

Incidentally I am pleased to see that the MP for Copeland has recently made sure the local newspapers knew that he was demanding action when a company was late paying its workers. I hope he will be even more vigorous in demanding that his own government pays out promptly the millions of pounds due to farmers, especially small farmers in this constituency.

I learn from the “people” diary in The Times that the new agriculture and rural affairs minister, David Miliband has appointed a new head of the rural payments agency. Apparently, “almost the instant” he arrived in DEFRA, David Miliband gave the job to Tony Cooper.

It’s a small world – Tony Cooper is the father of Yvette Cooper, who until they were both promoted in the reshuffle was Miliband’s number two in his role as minister of state in John Prescott’s former department.

I do not believe either in nepotism, which means appointing cronies or relatives to jobs in preference to better qualified people, or inverted nepotism, which means refusing to appoint the best qualified person because he or she has connections which might make the appointment look like nepotism.

If Cooper can sort out the mess with rural payments and finally give farmers the money they have been owed for months, few people will give a damn whose dad he is. If he doesn’t pay up PDQ, then this appointment will be yet another nail in the coffin of Labour’s rural support.

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